Noteworthy News

MedPAC Looks at New Quality Measures

Post
on February 4, 2015

Amid Medicare’s effort to encourage hospitals to improve the quality of the care they deliver, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) looked at new possible quality measures to contribute to that effort during a recent meeting in Washington, D.C.

Noting that current Medicare quality reporting measures are burdensome to track and do not have a strong correlation with better outcomes, MedPAC commissioners looked at a measure called “healthy days at home,” which is defined as “days in set time period that a given population is alive and did not have a non-ambulatory interaction with the health care system.”

The purpose of the presentation on this measure and quality in general was to promote discussion; MedPAC adopted no new positions on quality measures at its January meeting.

For a closer look at MedPAC’s perspective on hospital and physician quality reporting and the healthy days at home measure, see this presentation around which the agency’s January discussion was based.